NEW BEDFORD — On Aug. 16, 2012, South End resident Vincent Coccoli Jr. made his first push in a one-man campaign to bring better Internet to New Bedford:

"@FiOSTV Need fios in new Bedford ma really badly. Will it happening the year 2013?" he wrote from his "VincethePrince5" Twitter account.

Since that day, Coccoli, 28, has sent out 100 more Tweets, sometimes two or three a day, in an effort to shame Verizon — or anyone else — into installing ultra-fast, fiber-optic service in the city.

"I can imagine that it's not on a lot of people's to-do list, but for me, I want it," said Coccoli, who has also sent tweets to AT&T, Google and the city's own Twitter account. "It's the future and the real message is that New Bedford deserves just as good Internet as anyone else."

Coccoli, a Rhode Island native, had Verizon's FiOS service while living there. He moved to New Bedford in June 2011.

As a FiOS customer, Coccoli said he could play video games and watch movies at the same time. In New Bedford, he subscribes to Comcast, and said the same activities are plagued with delays.

"The town is awesome ... My only problem has really been with my cable," he said. "I guess it's being spoiled. I was used to a service that was elite."

FiOS runs on fiberglass technology, which can transmit nearly unlimited amounts of data through pulses of light. Comcast also has a fiber optic network, but it relies on a hybrid-fiber coaxial network to connect to consumers' homes from network nodes. That forces neighbors to share and can cause Internet speeds to slow during periods of peak usage.

"The fundamental difference between FiOS and cable is that cable is a shared resource and FiOS is a dedicated resource," said Roger Entner, an analyst for Dedham-based Recon Analytics, a telecomm research and consulting firm. Verizon offers FiOS to 112 communities in Massachusetts, many of them located in the ring of wealthy suburbs around Boston. In SouthCoast, Lakeville, Marion, Mattapoisett, Rochester and Wareham have access to the service, which costs hundreds of dollars per customer to install, according to Entner.

The company has said repeatedly it has no plans to expand its infrastructure.

"Our current focus is on those municipalities where we have a commitment to complete our build-out within a certain timeframe," said spokesman Phil Santoro. "I understand and appreciate the desire for FiOS. It truly is a phenomenal service."

This article was updated on Nov. 26, 2012, to correct the makeup of Comcast's fiber optic network. The connection to the homes run on a hybrid-fiber coax, not a copper-fiber hybrid as originally reported.